1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to interconnection of electrical parts and more particularly concerns hermaphroditic electrical connectors for connection of components or circuit boards to other components or other circuit boards.
2. Description of Related Art
As functions and operations of electronic equipment expand in scope and complexity, greater amounts of circuitry are necessarily employed. Circuit boards become larger, and increased numbers of such boards are employed. For example, very large capacity computers which embody massive parallel processing of data and massive parallel computational operations may employ large numbers of identical, or nearly identical, circuits. Often groups of similar or identical circuits are mounted on each of a large number of circuit boards. In a common type of multiple board packaging arrangement, boards of a group of mutually parallel daughter boards are positioned in parallel planes that are perpendicular to one side of a mother board, and a second group of such parallel daughter boards lie in planes perpendicular to the opposite side of the mother board. System operation requires the ability to interconnect circuits on one daughter board to circuits on another daughter board. The mother board is provided to afford such interconnections. Thus, a circuit on one daughter board is connected to a circuit on a second daughter board by a connection between the first daughter board and the mother board, appropriate circuitry in the mother board and a connection between circuitry of the mother board and the second daughter board. Such arrangements require rather complex and costly termination processes and hardware for interconnection of the daughter boards to the mother board. Importantly, length and impedance of the circuit path between the two interconnected daughter boards varies depending upon the location of the daughter boards with respect to one another and with respect to the interposed mother board. The path length of the connection between two daughter boards depends to a large extent upon the length of the interconnection path that is provided within the interposed mother board itself. Such varying path lengths introduce varying impedance and varying timing so that it may be necessary in some cases to introduce compensating timing circuits that account for differences in the time required for signals to traverse different ones of the circuit paths that interconnect daughter boards. Moreover, the required use of the interposed mother board and its circuits adds further to cost and complexity of the assembly.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide for connection of electrical components such as a circuit board to other components, such as another circuit board, by processes and hardware that avoid or eliminate above mentioned problems.